Modern corporate sustainability faces a big contradiction: companies are gathering more ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) data than ever, but leaders still struggle to know what to do with it.
Sustainability teams spend countless hours collecting numbers, filling spreadsheets, and tracking data. Yet, when important business decisions happen in the boardroom, this valuable information is often missing.
The future of ESG isn’t about gathering even more data. It’s about turning the data you already have into useful business insights. To shift ESG from a back-office task to a key part of strategy, organizations need to understand why their current systems aren’t working and how smart leaders are solving this problem.
I recently sat down with Ella Wilkinson, Director of BizClik Studio, at Sustainability Live Chicago to dig into some of the most pressing challenges for ESG teams in recent times. And the answer invariably points to data, its traceability and how different teams process it to drive decision making.
In this blog, I’m breaking down the conversation with Ella about how ESG teams can move from a siloed to a central business function, leverage automated disclosure solutions to build data transparency and create long-term value.
Built for the Wrong Audience: Why ESG Data Stalls Out
To understand why ESG data doesn’t help with day-to-day decisions, it’s important to know why companies started collecting it. ESG metrics didn’t come from regular business needs they were required by outside groups like regulators, investors, and rating agencies.
Because of this, internal data systems were created just to meet these outside demands to check boxes.
Since these systems focus on compliance, the data doesn’t easily turn into useful information for internal teams. High-level regulatory reports don’t answer the practical questions managers need to make decisions:
- Operations want to know which facilities or machines are causing sudden emissions spikes to fix the problem quickly.
- Procurement needs to find hidden sustainability and human rights risks in the supply chain before they cause trouble.
- The CFO wants to see how climate risks impact finances and investment choices.
Until ESG data can answer these specific, department-level questions, it’s just a costly compliance task not a helpful tool for managing the business.
The Right Data for the Right People
To make sustainability a key part of business strategy instead of just a back-office task, it needs to be understood and used by all teams. Leaders outside the sustainability team don’t need a broad, generic ESG score it doesn’t give them useful details.
What’s needed is a smart system that sits on top of the data and creates insights tailored to each role.
For example, a supply chain manager doesn’t want a general carbon footprint report. They need a custom dashboard that combines usual procurement measures like cost, speed, and reliability with local sustainability risks. When these are combined, sustainability becomes part of everyday decisions about sourcing and managing risks, not just something separate to report on.
Double Materiality: The Key to Smarter Business Decisions
Double Materiality is one of the most talked-about but often misunderstood ideas in sustainability reporting today. If it’s only seen as a box to tick for rules like the CSRD (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive), it just feels like a boring paperwork task.
But when used properly, double materiality becomes a powerful tool that helps a business move beyond just reporting and start planning for the future. It encourages leaders to see their company from two important angles:
- Inside-Out View (Impact Materiality): How the company’s daily work, factories, and decisions affect the environment, communities, and society.
- Outside-In View (Financial Materiality): How changes in the environment, resource shortages, extreme weather, and new climate rules could harm or help the company’s financial health.
Usually, companies only focus on financial risks. Double materiality changes that by looking at both the company’s impact on the world and how the world’s changes affect the company. This helps businesses stop just reacting to new rules and start preparing for how the changing environment will affect their finances.
The Challenge of Scaling ESG with Spreadsheets
Excel is a favourite tool for many corporate teams because it’s easy to use, flexible, and basically free. It works well for accountants and sustainability professionals, especially in the early stages of ESG programs but only up to a point.
As ESG regulations become stricter and disclosures face the same level of scrutiny as financial reports, spreadsheets begin to show their weaknesses.
Excel doesn’t have a clear, unchangeable audit trail, which means it can’t always prove where data came from or who made changes. When auditors or rating agencies ask for details about carbon emission numbers or formulas, spreadsheets leave companies vulnerable.
Here’s a quick comparison:
| Features | Spreadsheets (Excel) | Mature ESG Platforms |
| Data Flexibility | Very high (easy to change) | Controlled (standardized inputs) |
| Audit Trail | None (edits can be hidden) | Transparent and unchangeable logs |
| Data Lineage | Broken or manual tracking | Automatic tracking from source to report |
| Assurance Ready | Low (high risk of errors) | High (designed for audits) |
In short, spreadsheets are good for starting out but aren’t reliable enough for mature ESG reporting and to survive the looming wave of strict external assurance and auditing, organizations must outgrow the spreadsheet and build automated, verifiable data pipelines.
What “Good” Actually Looks Like: The Future of Mature ESG
When a company reaches true sustainability maturity, the ESG team is no longer on the sidelines or just part of marketing.
“Good” means the sustainability team has enough influence to meet directly with the CFO and contributes to decisions about investments and spending using climate data. It means climate risks and resource challenges are naturally considered before starting new projects or buying property.
Reaching this level of strength depends on one key thing: moving away from broken, disconnected systems and building a culture of reliable, traceable, and actionable data. IRIS Carbon’s platform helps organizations achieve this by providing transparent, trustworthy data that supports clear decision-making.
The future isn’t about collecting more data it’s about asking smarter questions and using data effectively to drive the business forward.
